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Thursday, September 27, 2012

The Laundry Room

I have a mental block when it comes to showing any project that has to do with my own home. Furniture, signs, impersonal things…those are great. But when it comes to a whole ROOM?? Well, that’s another story.

But the time has come to bite the bullet and show one of my summer projects: the laundry room.

When we moved into this house, I was THRILLED that it had a dedicated laundry room. In our first house, the laundry facilities were in an unfinished room in the basement (which was also slated to be another bathroom someday—didn’t happen while we lived there).

In our next house, a rental, we had a laundry “closet.” You know, where the washer and dryer are hidden away behind louvered doors in a hallway.

So this seemed like a big improvement.

Well, after 9 years in this house…I wasn’t so enamored anymore.

This is my real-life laundry room, folks—and with 8 of us in the household, I spend a fair amount of time in there! Sometimes it makes me want to weep.

The biggest problem, as I saw it, was really idiotic planning of the electrical/water hookups and the dryer exhaust. As you can see from the next photo, they are on opposite walls. That meant that, in order to make the connections, the dryer had to sit about 8 inches away from both walls. Ugh!

The washer also sat on a drip pan, which further limited it’s placement. When I took the washer out, this is what I saw:

OK, so how often do YOU clean under your washer??

The churning in my stomach helped me to decide that a drip pan was unnecessary (there is still a drain under the washer).

Our wonderful contractor friend (the same one responsible for the workshop project) created a new dryer exhaust for me, on the same wall as the electrical hookup.

The exhaust actually goes into the garage, where it makes an elbow and then exits the house (see above left). Honestly, I don’t care about that little piece of pipe in the corner of my garage. It bothers me FAR less than the wasted space in the laundry room. And now there are two holes on the outside of the house, but I don’t care about that either!

We replaced the shelf with stock cabinets from Lowe’s…

And then…I BUILT SOMETHING!!

I had an idea in my head after seeing various laundry “dressers” online. I didn’t have room for a dresser, so I built a laundry “tower.” It is made out of 1x2 pine, and I used the Kreg jig I bought for Christmas for the first time on this project (yes, it took me 6 months).

Want to see how it all turned out? Step into my laundry room…

I used a can of “oops” paint (which I doctored a bit) for the teal-y blue color. I have very little blue in my house, so this was a fun place to step out of my comfort zone a little!

I painted the cabinets white, and got some fun knobs from Hobby Lobby.

Here’s my beautiful laundry tower! It works! With the extra few inches gained from moving the washer and dryer over, there was suddenly enough room for baskets in the corner. The tower allows me to stack them, but still use them for sorting.

I used chalkboard paper to label each basket for “whites,” “light colors,” “dark colors,” and “jeans & towels.” Every Monday morning, the kids sort their own laundry into the baskets. Then when I’m ready to do a load, I just pull the basket off the tower and dump it in the washer! It’s brilliant, if I do say so myself!

I love the fact that I have some floor space in front of the dryer now. And I love that I finally found a place to hang my first ever “Sunshine” canvas that I made last year! (You may have noticed that I painted the laundry tower yellow to “coordinate.”)

Opposite the dryer, I hung a piece of pegboard, which I trimmed with some simple corner molding. Now there’s a place for mops, a duster, extension cords, and a few things like a spare tape measure and scissors. (All ofwhich the children have been threatened NOT TO TOUCH!)

The last touch…a cute rug from Target. And now my laundry room doesn’t bring me to tears each time I look at it!

Love the pop of the teal paint. Such a happy laundry room now. Great idea for the baskets - especially the space above each basket for adding laundry. Thank you for sharing your laundry room and stacking baskets holder.Joy

I absolutely love this laundry room, esp. the laundry tower! What a great idea. :) My husband and I are renters right now (and thus can't do this sort of makeover in our laundry room, due to the rental agreement constrictions), but I will DEFINITELY be referring back to this post once we're in a house of our own. Great job!

Well, if there's any tears, they should be tears of happiness now, Korrie! You did a great job redoing your laundry room. It's great that something as simple as moving the dryer exhaust helped give you some added space. Love the cabinets and your tower is great. It's providing a function and is out of the way.

Red Hen, you did a LOVELY job on the laundry room ! I was sure you were going to say that the baskets for the tower were labeled for each child and they would use it to take their clean clothes back to their rooms. You did such a great job it inspires me to do something with my just-as-dreadful laundry room !

I love your laundry tower. There are only two of us, but we make an amazing amount of laundry. Wonderful. My new house is going to have a mudroom/utility. Ithink a laundry tower would really benefit us.

That is quite a difference! Good job. My dryer vent is exactly like yours. The water pipes come from the floor, so both sit out a bit, but it is no problem for me.

The dryer vents directly to oudoors. Your setup has a danger built in. The long distance fr the dryer vent hose is a built in fire hazard. NOW, you need to unhook all that and clean it every six months. Or, have a service come clean it. My short one gets full of lint all the time. This is not to criticize, just a safety warning.

Yep. Brilliant. Love the tower. It took me 9 years to redo my laundry room, too. I still haven't shown it (no before pics) but it is about 50 times better than it was and it could still use some improvements. (Yes, that is how bad it used to be).

Love it! The basket tower is wonderful! My laundry is in an unfinished basement that was the old cellar. It has doesn't even have regular cement walls to it, just mortar that was added well after the house was built. You did a great job on yours!

I totally want to do laundry in there! I love that tower/sorter, what a great idea! The colors are so fun, too. Great re-do!*I'm having a little personalized giveaway going on now! Hope you can check it out!

It looks great! I love your subway art too. Isn't it so much more enjoyable to do the laundry in a cheerful room? The tower is very cool...may have to do something like that in my laundry room. Thanks for sharing!